


You Are a Call to Motion

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Series: Femslash Feb 2019 [4]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Dancing, F/F, Femslash February 2019, Mostly Canon Compliant, Short & Sweet, They're on a mission, and theres some rooftop kissin', inej is badass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 04:08:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17655818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: The music threads itself through the needlehead of the air, entraps itself within muscles, and brings two girls together in a star-lit ease.Day 4: Rhythm





	You Are a Call to Motion

**Author's Note:**

> youre damn right tht title is from movement by hozier no questions asked

Inej felt the simple rhythm before she ever heard it. Street performers she knows, and when she peeks her head over the roof's ledge, they come into focus. 

There's a stretched thin drum leading the charge, counting in the dancers that come up from off the street, and sending them off on their merry way, practically clicking their heels together as they twirl in time.

It was a sight to behold, one that made Inej's blood race and her chest physcially ache with a dull want that she hadn't allowed herself to feel in a ghastly amount of years.

Her fingers find the slopes of the beat, letting it patter out from her fingertips onto the rounded off shingles beneath her nimble feet. All she wants, all she could think of wanting, was for her arms and legs to find a the spiral of the open air, feel it on the lined skin of her palms, let it whistle through her ears as she moves faster, faster.

But she wasn't there for that, couldn't be ever again, she had a job, had a target, she had-

It was such lovely music. 

"Don't you wish you could be down there?" Nina asks reverently, her fingers bundled into the sweet slope of her cheek, trapping a cinnamon strand of hair against the wind-beaten red skin there.

Inej still wasn't sure how they'd been put together, though she thought it had something to do with Jesper. Most things in her life that caused her headaches were because of Jesper, so he figured it a safe bet that here and now, that was him, too.

"Do you?"

Nina smiles only with the corners of her mouth. "I think so."

"You think?"

"I asked you first, you know."

"Yes."

Nina's lips, wiped clean of their usual red stain, pucker slightly, a tick she had for when she was caught off guard. Inej let her own small smile unfurl one petal.

"We should dance one of these days, Inej. You and me. Show me what you've got."

Inej cocks her head forward, pointing out a body slipping through the throngs of people attracted by the drumbeat - which was now giving way to a lively fiddle, amping the dance up to draw the eye even further.

Without a word, she takes off, leaving Nina to send up the signal to Wylan as was their agreement. The roofline of Ketterdam moves swiftly below her feet, quiet footfalls taking her yards ahead in short-lived minutes. 

She scuttles down the side of the marked building she and Kaz had decided on the week before, her finger notching into crumbliing bricks that she lets go of the moment she touches them, if only to save herself the trouble of falling. 

No sooner than her feet hit the ground does she tug her cover over her mouth and nose and shoot like one of Jesper's bullets across the uneven ground of a back alley. She doesn't even have to look, cand hear the soft pops of Wylan's 'distractions,' and knows that she will meet her target hard and true.

They topple to the ground, his body giving way under her hands, skin giving way under the very tip of one of her saints. 

"Listen to me very closely," she hisses, letting blood bead from just over the bobbing apple in his throat. "Are you listening?"

He blinks, mumbles his pleading through white lips and lying teeth, but she takes it as a yes. 

"He'll be by in the next few days, and if you do not pay what you owe…." She shakes her head in mirth, letting her kife slip in her hand, enough to pull the fine stubble in his neck from their warren. "X marks the spot, don't you think?"

"Wh-what?"

She nicks the x in the hollow space of his throat, no more than a scratch, really, but it's enough. Kaz will get his money, and they will all live to fight another day, even the bumbling mess that was one second beneath her and the next beind her as she scrabbles out of the alley and darts back toward Nina.

As she vaults over the ledge, her feet kicking up dust and dirt and silt where she landed, Nina's head snaps toward her, a pleasant smile rolling across her lips.

Inej's heart pounded in her chest, though if that was from the thrill of the hunt, the giddiness of being once more with the air, or from Nina's bright face, was something that she can't yet determined. Either way it flushes something through her veins, something more than the courage she drinks from the teaspoon, something bigger than the bravery she carries in her heart. 

She cand feel it rushing through her, feel it forcing its way into her cheeks, her palms and her toes and her chest and, and, and. She was stood upon a tipping point, but if there was one thing she was not, had not been afraid of in a very long time, it was falling.

She grabs up Nina's hands in her own, pulls her in close, closer than anyone had perhaps ever been, let whatever it was that was moving in her move in Nina too.

The taller didn't protest, didn't even allow a hiccup from the moment Inej took her hands to the next in which they dance. Her eyes simply shine with unspoken laughter, her fingers tightening around Inej's, and they spin.

They spin until their heads arre dizzy and their hearts are rabbiting in their throats and their laughter surely reaches the stars. They twirl and shimmy and bounce, foot to foot, breath to breath, until their hair is whipping around them and their worlds are tilted on their axes. 

They are made from the twang of each chord, plucked by a masterful, untrained hand. Each step is a reverberation, each twist a response to an unheard call. 

Though she trained her body to be feather-light, to float from one place to another, to never anchor, no matter what, she can feel the weight of bones, each strip of muscle in her body, every sinew and joint and nerve. Watching Nina, beautiful, fearsome, heavenly Nina Zenik, she knows that she could feel it too. She wonders if their mouths met, if they slotted close enough together, she wonders if they could feel it in tandem.

They move in at the same time, each reaching for different pieces, Nina for cheeks to cup, Inej for hips to hold her steady, but it ends all the same, with Inej's question answered.

It's like the chemicals that made Wylan's bread and butter. It's like the drum iss in Inej's chest, in her stomach, in each bone of her body, all beating a rhythm that she can't so much hear as she can feel.

Nina pulls back with a sharp inhale. "I'm not getting you in trouble am I?"

"I'll handle it if it comes up."

"Then can I-"

Inej cuts her off by pulling them back together, letting her Spider hands spin webs in her hair. 

There won't be any question of where they've been - not for not caring, but for knowing, whole-heartedly. And though she might be signing them up from harmless jabs from Jesper and Wylan, both scarily in synch when it came to sussing out the best gossip, she finds she doen't mind.

Because for a moment her drumbeat heart is in the hands of the only person that had the capability to end it. Funnily enough, thiugh, she's the only one Inej dares believe won't do it harm.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @wlwshehulk !!


End file.
